ABSTRACT For online marketplaces to succeed and prevent a market of lemons, their feedback mechanism (reputation system) must differentiate among sellers and create price premiumsfor trustworthy ones as returns to their reputation. However, the literature has solely focused on numerical (positive and negative) feedback ratings, alas ignoring the role offeedback text comments. These text comments are proposed to convey useful reputation information about a seller’s prior transactions that cannot be fully captured with crude numerical ratings. Building upon the economics and trust literatures, this study examines the rich content of feedback text comments and their role in building buyer’s trust in a seller’s benevolence and credibility. In turn, benevolence and credibility are proposed to differentiate among sellers by influencing the price premiums that a seller receives from buyers. This paper utilizes content analysis to quantify over 10,000 publicly-available feedback text comments of 420 sellers in eBay’s online auction marketplace, and match them withprimary data from 420 buyers that recently transacted with these 420 sellers. These dyadic data show that evidence of extraordinarypast seller behavior contained in the sellers’ feedback text comments,createsprice premiums for reputable sellers by engendering buyer’s trust in the sellers’ benevolence and credibility (controlling for the impact of numerical ratings). The addition of text comments and benevolence helps explain a greater variance in price premiums (R,=20-30%). By showing the economic value of feedback text comments through trust in a seller’s benevolence and credibility, this study helps explain the success of online marketplaces thatprimarily rely on the text comments (versus crude numerical ratings) to differentiateamong,sellers and prevent a market of ‘lemon’ sellers.